High airflow vertical conveying gripper for robotic sorting of shredded metal residues

The European Green Deal has the ambition to enhance recycling practices to better close material loops. However, in the recycling industry of today it is common practice to shred products to liberate the different materials that the product contains. This, typically results in a broad range of object sizes and mixed waste streams, which increases the complexity for the robotic sorting of these waste streams. Nonetheless, to meet up with today's number of different material types and quality standards, the potential and demand for robust robotic sorting increases. While the robotic (sorting) industry is quickly evolving, currently used robotic grippers are often not designed to cope with the large variation in material types and shapes encountered in shredded material streams. Therefore, a novel High Airflow Vertical COnveying (HAVCO) gripping system is developed in the presented research. This HAVCO gripper is validated in an aluminum sorting use case, which demonstrated significant opportunities for the sorting of random shaped, small and light waste fractions, which typically pose challenges for the state-of-the-art gripper technologies. The main advantage of the presented HAVCO gripper is that it does not require challenging gripping pose estimation and proofs to be able to perform a robotic pick in less than 0.4 seconds, which is up to 3 times faster than commonly used parallel grippers while achieving high picking success rates of approximately 93%.